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Rebel in a Wheelchair

by Michelle DalPont

BROWN dirt, gritty sand, jaw-breaking cement, and cold metal have all had their own special moment with John Box.  He’s crashed, collided, scraped, scorched, and knocked his way into their memory—ingraining their surfaces with blood, sweat, and unsurpassed joy.  John Box is an adrenaline junkie, even if he scoffs at using such a term. He has driven cars to their breaking point, gunned the gas pedal to 140 miles per hour and peeled the window trim off.  John has broken, bruised, re-broken, stitched, and scraped arms and legs as if it were child’s play. Actually injuries were a common occurrence when he played as a child.  Now that he’s aged to a ripe old 43, John’s daredevil title is still fully intact and preserved through his notorious crashes with his huge off-road, go-kart-like car known as a sandrail.  John’s life equation has always included adventure and injuries; the difference now is he has added a wife and subtracted two working legs.

The Neosporin abrasions of childhood fade in comparison to what John has suffered since the motorcycle accident that paralyzed him. In this accident John severed his aorta and punctured his lung.  In one of his sandrail accidents, he broke his back.  While welding and fixing motors, John has acquired multiple burns and skin grafts.  Because of his paralysis he has endured pressure sores, bladder surgery, and kidney stones.  Maybe the measure of his adventurousness lies in the number of hospital visits over the years.  John has probably been to the hospital over 50 times.  But he shrugs it off solemnly:

“It’s probably not as much as Evel Knievel.”

When he isn’t wearing his red hat, John’s dirty blond hair is neatly gelled and spiked in little points not more than an inch thick. The bottom of his nose has a pinkish hue with little red veins on the tip. He wears square, black-rimmed glasses.  A neatly trimmed, bushy blond mustache runs straight across his upper lip, and adds years to his boyish face.  He wheels around on spunky red-tires and a flame patterned back rest, with side profiles of women on his billet wheels. 

Neither his billet wheels nor his crazy stunts have scared Mary off over the years.  John met Mary when he had been in a wheel chair for a number of years already.  The wheelchair didn’t stop Mary from liking him—or, for that matter, from even marrying him.  John thought women would never really pay attention to a guy in a wheelchair, but after their first date Mary’s attention was all on John. Her parents said that John was not fit to take care of her because of his paralysis.  She didn’t listen. She married him anyway.  She says there was something about John, something special about his demeanor and the way he conducted himself.

***

When John was seventeen and a half, he and his buddy, Kevin, were cruising on their motorcycles along Pacific Coast Highway. John felt pretty good that day. Kevin had just turned sixteen and they decided that they would visit the expensive car dealerships, like Ferrari and Porsche in Corona Del Mar. John was enjoying the freedom and the clean, salty air wrapping his Hawaiian-print shirt around his thin frame. He was riding ahead of Kevin, with an unknown motorcyclist in between. Kevin and John were in the right lane when a Mercedes Benz pulled out from the left lane and clipped John at 50 to 60 miles an hour. On the side of PCH, cars were lined up for miles along the shoreline. Flung off his bike, John skidded along the black concrete and into the axle of a raised Bronco on the side of the road. A nanosecond later, his bike scratched and scraped behind him and crushed him in against the Bronco’s wheel axle. Meanwhile, the motorcyclist between John and Kevin stopped dead in the middle of the road, perhaps to watch John’s crash. Kevin saw John fly off his bike, and the next instant he himself crashed into the stopped motorcyclist who had been in between them. Kevin flew off his bike and knocked the other guy off balance as well. Kevin got back on and rode his bike over to John. He found John pinned under the Bronco with nothing more than a shred of clothing on and his helmet. If Kevin hadn’t convinced John to wear a helmet, John would not have survived. John hated wearing helmets. Now, looking down at his crushed and unconscious friend, Kevin wondered if John was still alive. When the paramedics arrived on the scene, John let out a few moans as he was being lifted onto the stretcher. Kevin would never before have dreamt that he’d be happy to hear such a sad sound. John was taken to Hoag Memorial, in Newport Beach. Kevin drove his bike down to the hospital with a broken foot, but didn’t realize it until he got there.

In the trauma center, doctors opened John up. They were hunting for the source of his internal bleeding, trying to stanch the flow. They made an incision in John’s back and used a rib spreader. The doctors closed him up, but a blood clot had formed on his spinal column, paralyzing him from the chest down. After hours and hours of lying on the operating table, and having his heart fail him twice, John was sent to the ICU. Tubes, wires and monitors engulfed John’s frail, warped frame. Doctors gave him a five percent chance of survival.

At the time of his injury, the doctor told him that, basically, John had a mountain before him. He explained that John was metaphorically at the bottom of the mountain, but that could change depending on what he did with the news of his paralysis.  You have the opportunity to overcome your position, he told John, and climb up the mountain. “So kill myself or climb up a mountain,” John thought. There it was, his two options set before him.

But what happens after you climb up the mountain? Are there no more obstacles? Do you stop trying? No. Recalling the answer to the question now, John smiles with laughing eyes, causing the yellow ring in his blue iris to glow.

             “There are lots of other mountains,” he says to me. “Mountains have nothing to do with being disabled. Mountains are opportunities.”

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